AI Health Frontier - Issue 5

“AI is likely to be either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity.” - Stephen Hawking

AI is tackling diabetic retinopathy in India, helping to detect cancers in China, and we’ve already seen how AI is leapfrogging Africa’s development. But it’s rapid development comes with a word of warning: lack of (privacy) policies and poor implementation of new technologies can lead to economic and political instability. In African countries with weak rule of law or high debt burdens, those effects will be magnified.

The Fair Observer has written a great article about the potential of AI and the word of warning it comes with. This and more interesting articles in issue #5.

Ten cents won’t get you much in the American health care system —maybe a Band-Aid —but in parts of India, where nearly a quarter of the world’s blind population lives, it will cover the cost of a vision screening. See how Google is tackling Diabetic Retinopathy in India.

A deep learning platform designed to identify acute neurological conditions, including stroke, hemorrhage, and hydrocephalus, detected disease in CT scans in 1.2 seconds, or 150 times faster than human radiologists.

As of this week, the startup is working with 280 hospitals — among which 20 are outside of China — and steadily adding a dozen new partners weekly. It also claims that 70 percent of China’s top-tier hospitals use its lung-specific AI tool.

There are many factors that influence the aging process. Unlocking these factors can lead to valuable insights into what impacts the condition and health of the human body and reveal how to minimize these impacts.

People may think that an AI system for pathology that achieves a performance of 90% outperforms pathologists. However, pathologists are using microscopes for a task that includes complex computations, something humans are not good at and where humans would greatly benefit from the use of computers. So, are we making the right comparison?

Artificial intelligence is making big strides in a variety of medical fields. Now a company called Wision AI, based in Shanghai, Cina, is adapting artificial intelligence vision software to help doctors spot polyps during a colonoscopy.

MIT’s research has shown that deep learning can reveal invisible objects in the dark, which will be of practical importance for medical imaging to lower the exposure of the patient to harmful radiation, and for astronomical imaging.

Artificial intelligence will level out the quality of health care in China in the coming decades, particularly closing the gap between rural and urban parts of the country, according to a CEO in the medical industry.